


Arts of the Wizarding World

by alliedwolves



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Self Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-31
Updated: 2019-05-31
Packaged: 2020-03-30 22:47:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19037086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alliedwolves/pseuds/alliedwolves
Summary: Slytherins play five finger fillet for keeps. In the magical world, there's a lot of elegant solutions to this. Replacing one's hand with silver tied to someone else's will is *not* one of them.How complex does an artwork have to be before something of a person is left behind within it?





	1. Handy Peter

Handy Peter 

Slytherins play exploding snap for keeps. It's a point of pride. There are slytherins with whole hands, whole fingers, who don't lose, or don't play. Either way, they are a force to be wary of. There are those with a mishmash of stumps, missing joints, prosthetics, fingers badly healed or magicked green or silver or perfect and whole with someone's names written over their knuckles for good, in magic ink that writhes beneath their skins. Slytherin is a house of true friends, and true enemies, and the names could be a mercy or a reminder. 

Peter’s hand had no names carved or marked or even gouged into it. It was whole, gleaming, perfect, and silver. The colour of the heir. 

Peter Pettigrew hadn't been a slytherin. He hadn’t been popular with them either, so he'd never played exploding snap with them, or known what missing fingers meant. The slytherins played for keeps. They had a rolling, uncertain hierarchy of fingers and how many you had left, but just because it wasn't stringent and relied on luck didn't make it any less /binding/. Maybe the auror who'd found the finger at Godric's Hollow had been a slytherin, maybe they'd almost giggled, except that this was no school-ground hazing, this was a very real murder. There were almost certainly jokes about it in the slytherin common-room though. Kids aren't always cruel, but they are unthinking and unknowing and if they've been told that they're allowed to be evil, expected to be callous, they'd definitely get a chuckle out of the idiot gryffindor who lost all but a finger to the dark lord in a foolish gamble.


	2. Living Art

The paintings are caricatures, always. Whether they were the oldest sort, the kind that took days, months, weeks to make, or whether they were fleeting snapshots with hardly any thought put into them, really they were only sophisticated photographs.   
The difference was that photos were for capturing a moment in time. They weren’t for making a person come to life, remain alive, behind the frame, somehow sustained in more than memory. They were meant to depict the feeling in the moment and they did. Sombre or joyful or conflicted, the people in them had no words, only expressions because that was all there was time to capture. 

Portraits were character studies. Sometimes they were lies of varying degrees of flattering, but what they are is a permanent interpretation. Most of them can speak. Even the modern art ones, impressions of impressions, have a voice, though sometimes they’re distorted or wrong or simply mistaken. Something that wizards used to do is paint portraits of their worst enemies, and trade off, so the ugly thoughts and ugly interpretations can be seen and understood. They’re even better than a second in a duel: show me how you really feel, and let me argue back. Let’s understand each other.


End file.
